Tramping for Meaning: Labor History Moves West

Gordon Morris Bakken
California State University, Fullerton

Thomas Clark uses the experiences of labor unions in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the decades between 1890 and 1925 to argue that legal hurdles pushed labor into state and local politics in order to defend labor's rights and to advocate an ambitious progressive program of social reform. Clark's findings refute William Forbath's besieged interpretation of a labor retreat from politics in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.1 Further, his findings remind us that local history gives a far more precise picture of historical reality than do the pronouncements of historians on Sam Gompers. This is another important book in the "New Labor History."2	1
The current generation of new labor historians has found the tale of a triumphalist proletarian struggle against the capitalist pigs and their running dogs to be shop worn and poorly constructed. In setting the historiographical scene of labor law, for example, Clark notes that much of early labor history flowed from the pens of labor activists, union officials, and their lawyers. Their line was later taken up by Marxist, neo-Marxist, and Critical Legal Studies authors who wrote eloquently about the triumph of collective action in the New Deal and the covert sabotage by running-dog jurists who thwarted the glorious path to labor justice.3 Clark's position is that these renditions are mistaken because they failed to do primary research.4 He uses his research on California to argue for a "rights consciousness" that sharpened working-class consciousness and turned the state's union officials toward political action long before the New Deal.	2
How is it possible that labor historians could have missed this trend? Melvyn Dubofsky, one of labor's most distinguished historians, admitted, "Indeed, before the era of the New Deal, state and local governments probably had a greater impact on workers and unions than the federal government did." Yet he excluded state and local governmental action from his analysis "because a single scholar can only do so much."5 The new labor historians are taking up the challenge and studying local history and union locals.6 Perhaps legal historians will follow despite the research burden.7	3
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